From the United States to Japan and from China to India, the exhibition will evoke the extraordinary journey of Émile Guimet accompanied by the painter and illustrator Félix Régamey. In 1876, Émile Guimet (1838-1918), son of a Lyon-based industrialist, found the painter Félix Régamey (1844-1907) in the United States, whom he had met four years earlier. Both then embarked on a journey to the long courtyard, decisive for the museum's history, which would take them to Japan, China, Southeast Asia and India before returning to Europe. During the various stages, Guimet asked scholars for information as part of his investigation into the religions of the Far East. This research led him to create a museum for which he acquired many objects. At his side, Régamey drew sketches, a long work from which, back in France, he produced many works on Asian subjects. The two men who set off on the roads of Asia befriended and respected each other when nothing united them. Between Émile Guimet, a wealthy industrialist from Lyon, and Félix Régamey, a communard and press cartoonist, an intimate story, filled with humanity, will be expressed at the heart of the exhibition, based on a selection of paintings, large-format canvases, photographs, drawings, personal objects, letter exchanges, etc. These are just some of the testimonies that will allow us to follow the great story of two atypical personalities who loved to recall that their stay is "ten months that will illuminate all the rest of our lives".
A crucial moment since it was a preliminary step towards the foundation of the National Museum of Asian Art - Guimet. The museum, in fact, will be born from this journey, first in Lyon and then in Paris. In his search for exhaustiveness and his desire to understand religions, the scholar Émile Guimet brings back an extraordinary Buddhist Pantheon. An avid collector, he is one of the most astonishing figures of his time, who deeply marked the history of the taste for Asian art in France. This itinerancy of Émile Guimet and his travelling companion, who conceive travel as a philosophical journey, will also be a pretext for an open reflection on the first tourists of modern times.
